A Study Of Sula From The Perspective Of Carnival Theory

Tony Morrison is one of the most brilliant black woman writers in modern society. She won the Noble Prize in Literature in the 20 th century. What influences num erous scholars and critics most are her unique writing style. Morrison’s works pay much more attention to the bla ck’s life and th eir destiny, especially the dest inies of those black women who are in th e situation of gender discrim ination and racial oppression. Her literature works expose all sorts of problems in American society and tough lives of the black with the excellent description and brill iant depiction, which reveal her splendid writing style and deep thoughts. Most of all, she pays more attention to the voices from the black’s hearts and their desire for freedom and equality.Sula is the second novel of T ony Morrison. At first it caused extensive controversies. Critics in different fields held different views about the novel. However, as time goes by and Morrison’ s position promotes, these controversies disappear gradually. People began to pay attention to the content itself. Sula was different from the other works of Morrison. It began with the friendship between two black girls. Morrison depicted a virtual world that was su bverted upside down and filled with prom iscuous facts. When Sula came out in 1973, som e scholars analyzed it in different aspects, but mostly were the aspects of fe minism, prototype, theology, post-colonialism and so on. Applying carnival theory to the novel is very seldom and incomplete. The present thesis tries to analyze the novel with the basic view points of carnival theory. It aims to study the carnival elements contained in the novel by combining the text and carnival theory together.The thesis is divided into six parts, in cluding introduction, four main chapters and conclusion. The first part is introduction. It mainly introduces Tony Morrison’s life experience and literatu re career. Besides that, it em phasizes to in troduce the main content of Sula. The literature review at home and abroad is also analyzed in this part.Chapter One is the introduction of the carnival theory. In this chapter, it mainly introduces the theory and definition of carnival, its development and some main features, including the origin and development of carnival as well as carnival sense of the world.Chapter Two to Chapter Four ar e main parts of the thesis. Chap ter two recommends carnival collectives and concludes that from two dif ferent aspects. The first one is carnival figures. In this part, the thesis analyzes carnival tricksters, fools and clowns, by which can reveal the carnival el ements contained in the novel by m eans of analyzing specific images. The second is to ex plore typical paired images in the novel deeply, which aims to find out the internal dualism.Chapter Three analyzes carnival acts inten sively. It starts with two kinds of carnival acts in this cha pter to explore carnival factors in Sula. First of all, the thesis takes Helene and Nel as exam ples to analyze rituals of cro wning and decrowning on carnival square. It discusses their mental and psychological harm from different aspects. Comparing with the other figur es, it can easily find out th at different life conditions have different impacts on people. In addition to that, it also studies another ritual in this chapter----death. Death rituals appear in the novel many times. The thesis takes Little Chicken, etc. as examples to express the ex aggerated carnival elements in the novel by describing the outsiders’ attitudes to them.Chapter Four focuses itself on carnival sense of the world in the novel, which can also be regarded as carnival spirits. In Bakhtin’s opinion, there are four kinds of carnival sense of the world, while two of them would be discussed in Sula, which is the spirit of subversion and spirit of dialogicity. There are a mass of embodiments in the novel. The former explains spirit of subversion. The thes is starts with two as pects----the exchange of gender roles and overturn of traditional moralities. It further analyzes the spirit of subversion embodied in the novel by discussing some people’s behaviors like Sula. The latter explains the spirit of dialogicity. The thesis also begins with two aspects----cross swords between thoughts and attitudes as well as dialogue and m onologue among figures. It probes into dialogi city in the novel by analyzing the great dialogue and m ini dialogue.The last part is conclusion, in which it emphasizes Bakhtin’s carnival theory again based on that sums up the whole thesis. It concludes the carnival elements and specific behaviors that contained in the novel pr ofoundly. After the all-around analysis on Sula, it reveals profound sympathy that Morrison leaves on African Americans, especially to those black women.Morrison and Bakhtin were both ignored by society in a way. So as the members of social marginal groups, their though ts are close to each other and they can resonate in some way. Moreover, the creative ideas of Sula happen to hold the sam e view wi th Bakhtin’s carnival theory. They have so mething in common. So it’s better to apply Bakhtin’s carnival theory on Sula to dissect the carnival elements in it.